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166 Answers
166

Relationship between length and quality

If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.
— Mark Twain

The shortest version:

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
— Marcus T. Cicero

The near-perfectionist's version:

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
— Karl Friedrich Gauss

A good algorithm is like a sharp knife - it does exactly what it is supposed to do with a minimum amount of applied effort. Using the wrong algorithm to solve a problem is trying to cut a steak with a screwdriver: you may eventually get a digestible result, but you will expend considerable more effort than necessary, and the result is unlikely to be aesthetically pleasing.

@Mark That's not what I meant... This quote is about the misconception that choosing an open source product over a commercial one is better because you don't have to pay for license (use, not develop). This is stupid, of course, since most of the time whatever you saved in licences you pay in programmer time due to lack of support and/or using products that are not good enough. There are good reasons to use OS. License price, I think, is not one of them.
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HilaSep 28 '10 at 19:46

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

I am one of those culprits who created the problem. I used to write those programs back in the '60s and '70s, and was so proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space by not having to put '19' before the year.

How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity—in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"—are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

Programmers are optimists by nature, they also have a keen eye for the downside. A hyperactive imagination for disaster scenarios is a professional asset; they have to think through everything that can go wrong in order to practice their craft.